Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience

This is an easy read. Meant for those who would like to be able to follow a musical score and enjoy the listening experience. many musical citations throughout the text illustrate what is being explained in the text.

This book belongs in the hands of every aspiring orchestral musician, conductor, and avocational music-lover. Ambitious high-school students and conservatory undergraduates will especially appreciate the clarity and concision with which Dickreiter (through Pauly's fine translation) illuminates the labyrinth of abbreviations, symbols and page layout details for deciphering orchestral scores. Best of all, the book answers most basic questions about instrumentation (including foreign terminology, clefs and transpositions), performance practice and history, without forcing the reader to hunt down the information in several other sources. Musicians searching for practice material in reducing scores at the piano will not find it in this book, but they will find a handy reference with a sound review of orchestral history and instrumentation. Aspiring conductors will find a valuable introduction to their craft and all readers will appreciate the clarity of the text which conveys information without the baggage of elitist condescension or that chatty hand-holding which bloats many mass market "how to" or "dummies" books. Several of the score examples employ a format (found in the Norton Scores) that highlights prominent melodic lines with gray shading. This illustrates the dynamics of score reading very clearly for novices. The chapters are as follows: 1) Introduction, 2) Types of Scores, 3) The Look of a Score, 4) Scores and Their History, 5) Reading a Score - Hearing a Score, 6) Examples for Practicing Score Reading, 7) Orchestras and Conductors, 8) Instrumentation and Score Reading: Suggestions for Further Reading.